High Limit Rooms: Just Name The Game

Marquee, XS, Tryst, and Tao. Oh, and as of yesterday, Climax. These are nightclub names - a single, pretentious syllable or two, the utterance of which produces an ear-to-ear smile from nostalgia of that crazy night in Vegas.

It works for nightclubs, it sometimes works for restaurants, but it definitely doesn't work for high limit rooms. A few examples...

Bellagio's "Club Privé": on a weekend when demand was high enough to charge $499 per night, I never saw more than four people in there. Aria's "Carta Privada": I don't know if I was more surprised by $28 Vodka Redbulls or the fact that there were no more than two people playing there on a Saturday night. Mandalay's "Crystal Room": it gets so slow, they regularly shut it down. Aladdin's "London Club": LOL.

I can think of only one successful exception: "The Mansion." But that's only because it's attached to 29 palatial suites.

Naming these spots requires serious consideration. Culturally, there's no more diverse area of the casino than the high limit room where English is the minority language 100% of the year. As such, a universal title - more universal than "high limit," perhaps even more universal than the three letters "VIP" - is required as to not confuse patrons. Every packed high limit room in a top resort shares this universal name. While the marble polishers and carpet shampooers are out at 4am on a Tuesday, the rooms with this name are still getting plenty of action. It's a name that might be misleading, but every blackjack, roulette, pai gow, or even craps player with the means to spend countless hours playing these limits looks for this word.

That word is "Baccarat."

Accepted in every language to mean high stakes, even if you don't play the specific game, every "Baccarat" salon has a few blackjack tables, a couple roulette tables, and sometimes a pai gow or craps table as well. Wynn, Bellagio, and Aria's "Baccarat" rooms hardly ever sit empty.

And then what does Cosmopolitan do? They go ahead and name their latest space "Talon." Spare us the obscure gambling reference, Cosmo - nobody is going to get that.

Imagine a player has arrived from Beijing, has just checked in to his Eastside penthouse, and is now ready to try his luck at the tables. If that elevator button says "Talon" instead of "Baccarat," you can bet the player will hit the ground floor and say the Mandarin equivalent to, "What the fuck are all these fedoras around here? Where's the baccarat?"

It's a small thing, I know, but it seems Cosmo has done everything it can to be hip, cool, and different. It's worked for the food and beverage department and even keeps the rooms mostly occupied.

Back when I was growing up and my dad was a "whale", "baccarat pit" was the term everyone used to refer to every high-limit pit in every casino everywhere...None of them had names...Hell, none of them even had signs saying "Baccarat" or "High Limit"...They were just pits of high-limit tables...baccarat, roulette, blackjack...set off to the side of the casino with a bunch of intimidating dudes in tuxedos standing at the entrance to keep the rif-raff out...I don't know when the trend of naming them, or even marking them with signage indicating what they were, even started...

Malibugolfer posted on Tuesday, 15th November 2011 - 4:04 pm

Great take Mike. No surprise to read this from the Sun: "The posh resort, which cost owner Deutsche Bank $3.9 billion to build, said it didn't win as much money as expected from gamblers. Its hold percentage for table games during the first nine months of the year was 9.4 percent, well below the 12 percent to 15 percent it expected."